Government right to exempt firefighters from ACA

The federal government actually displayed a little common sense last week.

Volunteer firefighters and other first responders will not be defined as full-time personnel under the Affordable Care Act, according to a statement released by the U.S. Department of Treasury on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

In an inexplicable move, the Affordable Care Act had a provision that would allow for fire companies to be fined if they did not provide insurance for their volunteers.

We were simply at a loss as to how the federal government determined ‘volunteers’ were full-time employees.

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And apparently so were a lot of other folks, including U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, Congressman Pat Meehan and state Sen. John Rafferty, just to name a few. Toomey and Meehan are part of a congressional coalition that endorses the Protect Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act. The three joined together last month to point out the ridiculousness of the legislation, that, if enforced, could possibly have put fire companies across the nation out of business, and nowhere more so than right here in Pennsylvania.

The Treasury Department and the IRS expect final resolutions that will define how various volunteers are treated under the employer shared responsibility provision of the Affordable Care Act, which initially determined that an employer with 50 or more “full-time employees” must offer affordable and adequate health care coverage to its employees.

We put the quote marks around full-time employees to once again make the case that even a modicum of common sense would tell most people that a volunteer position is not the same as an employee that punches a clock every day.

While we certainly hate to think the worst about anyone, especially those running our federal government, but the idea the IRS had to refer to the “volunteer hours of bona fide volunteer firefighters,” does give us the sneaky suspicion the Internal Revenue Service might have though local fire companies were trying to get over on them by not counting all of the full time employees honestly.

The very idea of not having volunteer firefighters around should strike fear in the heart of every taxpaying citizen. Imagine what your local tax bill would look like if you had to tack on paying for a fully staffed fire department.

We appreciate the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service seeing the error of their ways before any action was taken against a fire company. We not sure how the federal government could have, or if it would have, backed off once legal action was set into motion, and thankfully, we won’t have to find out.